


Of Cabbages and Kings

by Zoya1416



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Carrot Thinking, Comment Fic, Destiny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 23:17:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2791313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoya1416/pseuds/Zoya1416
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the King of Ankh Morpork wants to claim his throne.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Cabbages and Kings

The King of Ankh Morpork walked his beat, smiling and nodding to the populace. The summer weather was steaming, making the armor very hot. He scarcely noticed. He'd been wearing it for years, and couldn't imagine life without it, or without his sword. He'd grown up with neither in the dwarf mines at Copperhead, but that was ages ago.

“Hello, Mr. Grabforthethroat! Your axe looks especially shiny today!” The dwarf was pleased to be noticed by the King, and greeted him in turn. The dwarf probably worked at the newspaper, a restaurant, or Grabpot Thundergust's cosmetic factory, but nothing would part him from the cultural weapon. 

“Good morning, Miss Fire Agate. You're looking very polished.” The younger trolls, as in any race, played a role in fashion change. Previously, lady trolls had cultivated fine lichen as a sign of beauty. This generation had decided that smooth polishing revealed the natural colors of their rocky skin, and the avant garde was shaking up the community.

“Done-it-Duncan, we haven't seen you at the watch house recently. Someone said they'd seen you playing the tourist trade—we wouldn't want that, would we?”

Done-it-Duncan grimaced and walked away quickly. The King was warning him that his switch from confessing everything to carefully picking a few pockets had been noticed. How Carrot knew what he'd been up to, when the Thieves' Guild hadn't realized yet, always puzzled him. Maybe he needed to leave Ankh Morpork for the summer.

The King processed onward, passing on from the Shades to the Scours, around to Kicklebury Street, and back to Pseudopolis Yard by the Contract Bridge. At the Yard, his alternate personality took over, and, nodding and chatting with all the watchmen, Carrot went into his room and shut the door.

He lay down on the bed, and allowed a sigh to escape his lungs and a scowl to cross his face. Both would have startled the other watchmen. It had seemed silly, when people began to say that he was the King returned, an ancient line now recovered. He'd ignored this, except in moments when it was helpful. Getting Mr. Vimes appointed Duke after the Klatchian war was one of those times. 

Mr. Vimes had stopped a war by arresting two armies, but Carrot knew he was just as responsible for keeping the peace by making them play football instead of fighting. After the war that wasn't, it seemed only right that the Commander should have a reward, so he'd quietly suggested it to Lord Vetinari. When the Commander had protested that only a king could make a Duke, the Patrician had said smoothly, “If there ever is a king, I'm sure he will ratify my decision.” When Mr. Vimes looked sharply at them, the Patrician had stared Mr. Vimes down, and that was that. 

Another time he'd run his sword completely through a villain, and had continued out of anger to drive it a foot deep into the stone column the man was standing against. Only then did he remember that Colon and Nobby had mused that a king shouldn't be chosen by pulling a sword out of a stone, but by “finding the man wot did all the hard work putting it in.”

So his desire to rule as king had been hidden and suppressed under his deep simplicity. He polished his armor until it was very bright, and sharpened his old, undecorated, but well balanced sword every day. Many thought Carrot must be stupid to appear so simple. They never considered how much work it was to maintain this facade. Sometimes it was quite hard not to let the shrewd, pragmatic, and dangerous king suppress his natural kindness. 

He would be a good king, he was sure. He yearned to lead the city up from its squalor to a better future. In that regard, his ideas ran right up against the Patrician's and stopped. The Patrician had his own theories about the city, mainly that what people really wanted was for tomorrow to be just like today. Lord Vetinari, too, wanted a better Ankh Morpork, but he ruled mostly by getting the guilds to believe that a future with him was to be preferred to a future without.

Carrot had often wondered, at least in the times he let the King think, whether he and the Patrician could run the city together. Could they cooperate in sharing power, or would one of them always have to be the figurehead? Would it be so hard to propose changes, regally, and let Lord Vetinari carry them out?

Carrot sighed again and rolled over on his side to look out the window of his little room. He could see the Palace, five stories high and imposing. What if a situation, as King, could go so wrong that they might want to kill each other? He was much stronger and younger than the Patrician, but the man was a trained and subtle Assassin. A King could get Ankh Morpork's people to obey him and overthrow the Palace. 

It was at this point in his thinking that Carrot firmly tamped down the King. He'd heard Vetinari say that it was all well to overthrow the tyrant, but that the next day people would be complaining that the trash was piling up since the tyrant was removed. He didn't knew whether his natural krisma was enough to make people go back to work. 

Carrot had also heard Mr. Vimes rant on many occasions, saying that Vetinari was a bastard, but at least he didn't claim he had a divine or hereditary right to rule. Mr. Vimes might well join Vetinari in having him assassinated, should he ever attempt to take the throne. He'd have to abdicate, and then he'd be worse off than if he'd never tried Kinging. 

About the hereditary thing—he loved Angua passionately, but one of the reasons he hadn't asked her to marry him was fear about their potential children. Angua thought he was too shy to discuss this. He was, with a dwarf's typical modesty about family matters, but that wasn't all. He could barely admit it to himself, but he was worried about having werewolf children. She was the only decent member of her family, beside the brother forever stuck in wolf form. Could he and Angua raise children to be moral and kind, or would werewolf instincts doom their efforts? He couldn't bear to think that a child of his might grow up to be like her brother Wolfgang.

Heaving another huge sigh, he opened his door and went down to the watch house common room. 

“'ere, Captain, I saved you a bit of the rat pie I was having for lunch. Thought you might be hungry.”

It was a younger dwarf, possibly female, Cassini Nosebiter, who offered him the food. He took it gratefully, and smiled at the young person. The piecrust was yeasty and crunchy, and there was plenty of catsup.

They probably wouldn't allow rat pie at the Palace. He'd have to mix with all the sneering nobs who ate fiddly little sandwiches and acted clever. They made him long for the simple feuds of the dwarf mines, where arguments could be settled by axes, or at least by yelling and threatening axes. The social doings that the Commander had to attend frankly scared him, not least because the King wanted to crawl out and shout down all the fawning faces who snickered at Mr. Vimes. 

He beat the King back to his cell, and locked it. Being King would mean giving up his life here. Bad working hours, out in the heat and cold and stench every day, constant danger, amazing amounts of paperwork, the complaints of all those he now supervised—he loved it.

“Thanks, Cassini. Do you have the daily growls from last night's patrols?”

The young dwarf smiled and handed over the reports. The king gave up and lay on the straw mattress in his dungeon, and the simple Captain Carrot took over again.


End file.
